Attention

As of June 30, 2025, the Isaac ROS Buildfarm for Isaac ROS 2.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal is no longer supported.

Due to an isolated infrastructure event, all ROS 2 Humble Debian packages that were previously built for Ubuntu 20.04 are no longer available in the Isaac Apt Repository. All artifacts for Isaac ROS 3.0 and later are built and maintained with a more robust pipeline.

Users are encouraged to migrate to the latest version of Isaac ROS. The source code for Isaac ROS 2.1 continues to be available on the release-2.1 branches of the Isaac ROS GitHub repositories.

The original documentation for Isaac ROS 2.1 is preserved below.

Tutorial For RealSense-based Encoding

In this tutorial, you perform H.264 encoding using a RealSense camera and isaac_ros_h264_encoder to save compressed images into a rosbag.

Note

This tutorial requires a compatible RealSense camera from the list of cameras.

Complete the RealSense setup tutorial.
Complete steps 1-2 as described in the quickstart guide.
Open a new terminal and launch the Docker container using the run_dev.sh script:
```
cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src/isaac_ros_common && \
  ./scripts/run_dev.sh
```

Build and source the workspace:

cd /workspaces/isaac_ros-dev && \
  colcon build --symlink-install && \
  source install/setup.bash

Run the launch file. This launch file launches the example and saves CompressedImage and CameraInfo topic data into a rosbag in your current folder:
```
ros2 launch isaac_ros_h264_encoder isaac_ros_h264_encoder_realsense.launch.py
```
(Optional) If you want to decode and visualize the images from the rosbag, you can place the recorded rosbag into an x86 machine equipped with NVIDIA GPU, then follow steps 7 and 8 in the Quickstart section. (Change the rosbag path and input the dimension accordingly in step 7):
```
ros2 launch isaac_ros_h264_decoder isaac_ros_h264_decoder_rosbag.launch.py rosbag_path:=<"path to your rosbag folder"> input_width:=640 input_height:=480
```

For example, the result looks like: